Like the view on an open highway, you can see
everything that happens in Wild Hogs coming from a mile away. A tedious
exercise of a midlife crisis comedy, the movie is more like watching four actors
go through their own career midlife crises. First there's Tim Allen, who went
from standup comic to sitcom star to promising comic feature future to being
type-cast in cheesy family fare. Then there's Martin Lawrence, who had a
similar route to Allen's but ended up making his career in drag. Third,
continuing his downward slope, is John Travolta, whose career fallout/comeback
ratio is decidedly weighted in the former's direction. Rounding out the quartet
is William H. Macy, a great actor apparently trying to get some mainstream
exposure. Put the four on motorcycles, send them across the country, and set up
a sadly formulaic road trip story, filling the script with cliché after cliché,
hoping it all works out for the best. It does not. Wild Hogs is an
innocuous, monotonous comedy that at least has a playful spirit, but its tone
doesn't amount to much when pitted against forced shtick and an even more forced
attempt at a plot.

Allen plays Doug Madsen, a dentist with a sexy
wife (Jill Hennessy) and a son who gets to eat bacon while he's left with
grapefruit. Lawrence is Bobby Davis, whose year timeline to write is over and
whose wife (Tichina Arnold) is forcing to go back to being a plumber. Macy is
Dudley Frank, a computer guy who has difficulties with the ladies. Travolta is
Woody Stevens, a formerly rich man with bankruptcy and divorce pending. Occasionally the four friends go riding on their motorcycles together, donning
leather jackets with patches that Doug's wife designed and sewed, bearing their
gang's name the Wild Hogs, and hitting a local bar for drinks. One afternoon
out, Woody proclaims his midlife frustrations with his buddies and suggests that
they all take a road trip out to California on their bikes. Dudley has no qualms.
Bobby knows his wife would never let him, and a lie about a convention
covers that. Doug is hesitant, but after suffering a panic attack at the dinner
table, he takes his wife's suggestion that he should. All meeting together on
the freeway and throwing away their cell phones, they hit the road to the coast.

Yes, it's male bonding time, just like that movie
Deliverance, to which Woody compares their trip in one of the movie's few
funny lines. Their first day on the road a bust (a group of college girls
laughs as they huddle together under tarps to hide from the rain), they all
gather around the campfire and woe about how their lives haven't turned out the
way they thought they would. This isn't any kind of introspective look at the
middle-aged male psyche, though, as we're quickly reminded when Doug throws his
flaming marshmallow behind him, setting their tent ablaze (Dudley literally adds
fuel to the fire). Spending the night together lined up on an air mattress,
they awake to a cop (John C. McGinley) watching over them. Have we still not
moved beyond the homophobic stereotype of the perverted gay man? Apparently
not, because here it is. Just shy of drooling while telling the men how lucky
they are, it's a scene that sends the movie to a crashing stop. It's not over
yet, though, as the patrolman reappears to join the men for some skinny dipping
after they've scared away a family.

Fortunately, there's no second encore appearance,
and while the rest of the gags are nowhere near as narrow-minded, they fall flat
for familiarity and banality. Bugs hit the guys as they're riding, and a bird
hits Woody after he's done laughing at them. A weird karaoke singer is thrown
in at a festival they attend. They have the opportunity to slap a bull, and
after escaping, it gets out of its pen to wreak some more havoc. And so on. As
though the jokes weren't flat enough, there is a pathetic plot thrown in around
the halfway mark, as the guys go to a real biker bar and incur the wrath of the
Del Fuegos, whose leader is played by Ray Liotta. Woody accidentally blows up
their bar, forcing the suburban bikers into hiding in a small town. Needless to
say, the gang hunts them down, and there's a standoff between our heroes and the
real bikers. The cast is lost in this one. Allen and Lawrence are kept on the
sidelines—good for them—and make no impression, and Travolta's uncomfortably
over-the-top attempts to earn laughs from his character's desperation is
baffling. Only Macy comes out unscathed as the bumbling Dudley, whose
perfection of one really lame dance move helps to woo a pretty townie played by
Marisa Tomei.

It plays out exactly as we
expect—no surprises, no frills, and little laughs. When an icon of motorcycle
cinema emerges at the finale to give our heroes his blessing and apparently pass
on the torch, it's more sad than anything else the movie is hoping to achieve
with the moment. Wild Hogs is tiring stuff.